68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In the system of Spencer, as in that of Comte, sociology appears 

 at the top of the scientific series, but with him this pinnacle of 

 knowledge is really and solidly connected with the building itself. 

 In spite of their much greater complexity, social phenomena are 

 essentially identical with those of inferior cosmic life. Sociology for 

 Herbert Spencer is a physical science like others, requiring no pecul- 

 iar synthetic or subjective methods, and its aim with him can not be 

 any other than the reduction of the specific laws of social life to the 

 universal laws of motion. 



Passing to the delimitation of the sociological domain and to the 

 definition of the object of that science by Herbert Spencer, I must 

 observe that those matters, in modern evolutionism, present a degree 

 of complication which Comte avoided by the artificial isolation he 

 created for sociology in his philosophical system. Natural science 

 teaches us that association is the law of every existence. What we 

 usually call society in common speech is only a particular case of 

 that general law. A being, whether social or not, is never absolute, 

 indivisible ; but essentially comparative and multiple, resulting from 

 the action of a number of forces converging on one point. 



Political and social systems speak a good deal about "individual" 

 and " society " ; but the very point where the individual ends and 

 society begins has never yet been fixed with any accuracy. The 

 most prominent botanists and zoologists, who have to deal with this 

 matter for their own technical purposes, have been led to acknowledge 

 several degrees of individuality : we can consider each individual as 

 a whole, or a person, in comparison with the individuals of a degree 

 beneath it ; but when we compare it with the individuality of a supe- 

 rior degree, it soon loses its personality and appears as a part, a mem- 

 ber, or an organ. There are myriads of plants (algce) and animals 

 {infusoria}), which are styled monocellules, and which, indeed, are 

 considered as consisting of one single organic element or cell, although 

 their anatomical structure appears, sometimes, very complex and per- 

 fect in its peculiar style. But organic cells quite identical with these 

 form also aggregations, or associations, more or less compound ; and 

 such groups of cells either live independently, unfolding their own 

 botanical or zoloogical individuality, or enter, in the shape of textures 

 and organs, into the composition of other still superior individual 

 beings. Men, like other mammalia, are, in fact, associations of such 

 colonics of cells. Our inveterate tendency to consider oui'selves as an 

 end and a center of the creation makes us prone to prejudge that our 

 own individuality is the only genuine one. 



It would be hardly possible to review in a few lines the remarkable 

 researches into the various degrees of vegetable and animal individ- 

 uality of Niigeli, Virchow, Huxley, Haeckel, and many others ; and it 

 is beyond my competence to settle whether absolute individuality, i.e., 

 morphological indivisibility, ought to be granted to cells — as was as- 



